The wild bunch
In October 1972, Sparky Anderson, the manager of the Cincinnati Reds, was asked about his team’s preparations for the World Series, which was due to start later that week. How did the newly crowned National League champions match up against the Oakland A’s, the scrappy club that had taken the American League title in a tense five-game tilt against the Detroit Tigers? Actually, Anderson said, he wasn’t sure what to think just yet — he’d been pulling for the other guys. “I really would have liked to play the Tigers,” he said. “They’re much more predictable. Gee whiz, you don’t know what these A’s are going to do.”
The protocol of competitive sports suggests that the Reds’ skipper should have been a little less forthright. You don’t go around saying you’d clobber one team but fear another. Anderson, though, was only admitting what a lot of his peers were probably thinking. As Jason Turbow reminds us in his carefully researched and often hilarious new book, the A’s, in the first half of the 1970s, were as wild a bunch as Major League Baseball had seen in decades. They were also immensely talented.
Resplendent in green and gold polyester V-necks and sporting some of the finest mustaches this side of a Burt Reynolds film, the team reeled off three consecutive World Series wins. They were the first to do so since the early ’50s Yankees. All the while, they fought tirelessly among themselves — in the locker room, on the field and in the pages of Bay Area newspapers. “Well, that’s it,” third baseman Sal Bando said one day in 1974, having just broken up a clubhouse brawl between teammates Billy North and Reggie Jackson. “We’re definitely going to win big tonight.”
The A’s heyday is rich with story lines, but Turbow doesn’t just focus on the winning years. An East Bay resident and the author of a 2010 book about the sport’s unwritten rules (“The Baseball Codes”), he’s just as interested in the eras that bookended Oakland’s championships in 1972, ’73 and ’74. Accordingly, “Dynastic, Bombastic, Fantastic” is structured like a classic three-act drama: The rise, reign and fall of the House of Oakland, as recalled by the men who swung the bats, sprouted the sideburns and threw the punches.
In a story full of complex personalities, Turbow’s unchallenged antihero is the man who selected the ballplayers and paid their wages. Charlie Finley, a self-made insurance magnate, bought the Kansas City A’s in 1960. “In 1964,” Turbow writes, “the A’s signed 80 players for about $650,000 — the most ever spent by one team on amateur talent in a single year.” By the time he
moved the team to Northern California — the A’s played their first home game in the Oakland Coliseum on April 17, 1968 — Finley had assembled a young core that included Jackson, Bando, ace righthander Catfish Hunter and reliever Rollie Fingers.
A classic control fanatic, Finley acted as his own general manager, which was unorthodox enough. Even more unusual was the degree to which he orchestrated every aspect of the team’s affairs, doling out petty punishments along the way. “When it became clear that attendance in Oakland would touch only about 900,000” in 1971, Turbow writes, “Finley abruptly canceled Fan Appreciation Day and barred his players from participating in a 1,000seat civic luncheon scheduled in their honor.” He was alternately profligate and miserly. Finley once offered Vida Blue a $12,000 bonus in a failed attempt to persuade the pitcher to adopt a rhyming nickname (“True” Blue). But when it came time to buy his players championship rings after their second and third World Series wins, Turbow says, he opted for “green glass in place of diamonds.”
Some of Finley’s players were just as mercurial. Those that weren’t tended to get caught up in the chaos of the A’s clubhouse. Physical altercations were so common — by my count, there are at least a half dozen in these pages, including one in which “Finley swiped at” and cut a reporter’s face — that when shortstop Bert Campaneris grabbed a table knife and went after” Jackson during a team dinner in 1973, nobody got worked up about it.
“Dynastic, Bombastic, Fantastic” has plenty to offer fans both serious and casual. Turbow does a wonderful job of describing how the game “slows down” when a hitter is “in the zone,” as Gene Tenace was when he hit four homers in the ’72 Series. And because he spent so much time interviewing the players themselves — he chatted with one ex-A in a rental car, accompanied another to a doctor’s office and visited Mount Rushmore with a third — Turbow has unearthed new perspectives on brief but important chapters in team history. After Israeli athletes were killed by terrorists during the 1972 Summer Olympics, he writes, first baseman Mike Epstein and pitcher Ken Holtzman, both of whom are Jewish, added black armbands to their uniform tops, wearing them “right on into the playoffs.”
This is also a very funny book, especially if you read Turbow’s many footnotes. Though the A’s won a lot, being in Oakland didn’t help when it came to landing endorsement contracts. Which is why, he writes, “Tenace and Bando pounced on one of the few opportunities that came their way, from a toupee shop in Manhattan — the primary payment being free replacement hair.” Another footnote finds two A’s in an amusing fish-out-of-water setting: “Holtzman scanned newspapers to find the local bridge club in a given city where he, Fingers, and (Oakland Tribune writer Ron) Bergman would go for games. ‘We’d be the only three guys there, major leaguers playing against 85-year-old women,’ Holtzman said.”
Turbow devotes the last few chapters to the A’s decline, a period during which players were lost to free agency and bad trades. They reached the playoffs in 1975, but would close out the decade with three consecutive losing seasons. Even in the good days, the Coliseum was rarely full, but by 1979, the situation was ridiculous. That year, the A’s lost twice as many games as they won, he writes, “and Coliseum attendance submarined to 306,763, or 3,787 per game.” A mid-April game drew fewer than 700. The A’s would win again in the 1980s, but as the ’70s closed, Turbow notes, they “were essentially a rubble pile.”
Kevin Canfield has written for Bookforum, Film Comment and other publications. Email: books@sfchronicle.com